I have Slackware 14.2 64bit running on a laptop with integrated Intel graphics. I built a custom version of the latest 4.15.0 kernel from Linus' tree; it loads the i915 driver to handle graphics on this machine.

After installing the latest build of Chromium from Eric Hameleers' (alienbob's) repo I started noticing the following issue:

Hovering over some buttons on various websites (forums like this one, or Youtube for instance, which is the most consistent culprit) displays tooltips with garbled white-font-on-black-background text.

I found this old long discussion about what appears to be a long-standing issue to this same effect in Chrome. On that page, this picture posted by one of participants is particularly representative of what I see.

It might help to also mention that I run a number of distros on this same machine, sharing the same kernel, and this only happens on Slackware with this specific build. For instance, as I type this, I am booted into Void Linux which carries

Version 63.0.3239.84 (Developer Build) (64-bit)

of Chromium and can see no trace of the problem. Ditto for an Arch install which at the time of this writing has Chromium 64.0.3282.140.

Same chromium settings (hardware acceleration...) on all distros?

I am making pastebins of the contents of chrome://gpu on the three I mentioned (in all cases I am pasting the entirety of that page, gathered with Ctrl+A Ctrl+C and dumped in a text editor):

arch

slackware

void

Some remarks:

(1) To answer the question in the previous post: the settings at the top of the pages do seem to be the same, with the only difference that Void has a 'Video Encode' line whereas the other two do not; this doesn't look like it'll be relevant though..

(2) The two rolling distros, which do not exhibit the issue, have the same much newer version of the Mesa package: 17.3.3 vs Slackware's 11.2.2

(3) Slackware's page displays those ugly log messages at the very end under 'Video Acceleration Information', whereas the well-behaving instances don't:

Log Messages
[1251:1251:0204/202529.950331:WARNING:ipc_message_attachment_set.cc(49)] : MessageAttachmentSet destroyed with unconsumed attachments: 0/1
[1251:1251:0204/202529.950374:WARNING:ipc_message_attachment_set.cc(49)] : MessageAttachmentSet destroyed with unconsumed attachments: 0/1
[1251:1251:0204/202529.963102:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(18162)] : [.DisplayCompositor-0x5618ef684e50]GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_OPERATION : glCreateAndConsumeTextureCHROMIUM: invalid mailbox name
[1251:1251:0204/202529.963155:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(10008)] : [.DisplayCompositor-0x5618ef684e50]RENDER WARNING: texture bound to texture unit 0 is not renderable. It maybe non-power-of-2 and have incompatible texture filtering.
[1251:1251:0204/202529.963193:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(18162)] : [.DisplayCompositor-0x5618ef684e50]GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_OPERATION : glCreateAndConsumeTextureCHROMIUM: invalid mailbox name
[1251:1251:0204/202529.963217:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(10008)] : [.DisplayCompositor-0x5618ef684e50]RENDER WARNING: texture bound to texture unit 0 is not renderable. It maybe non-power-of-2 and have incompatible texture filtering.
[1251:1251:0204/202529.963255:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(18162)] : [.DisplayCompositor-0x5618ef684e50]GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_OPERATION : glCreateAndConsumeTextureCHROMIUM: invalid mailbox name
[1251:1251:0204/202529.963281:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(10008)] : [.DisplayCompositor-0x5618ef684e50]RENDER WARNING: texture bound to texture unit 0 is not renderable. It maybe non-power-of-2 and have incompatible texture filtering.